The 1990 “Decade of the Brain” initiative in the US prompted a global follow-up with shifts in funding towards neuroscientific research. Since, scholars have treated the 1990s as either a singular rupture or seamless continuity. This paper will show how, rather than a singular disciplinary take-over by “Neuroscience” of knowledge production on mental illness, this period saw the emergence of what I categorize as translational neuroscience - a translational imperative that reshaped both basic neurobiology and clinical research traditions.
Drawing on archival research at leading psychiatric and neuroscience institutions in the United States and Germany, alongside interviews with over twenty neuroscientists, this paper traces how this conceptualization of “translational” knowledge production on mental disorders was established through intertwinements of macro-level science policy shifts, meso-level institutional reforms, and micro-level changes in experimental practices. I compare these processes at the National Institute of Mental Health, Emory University, and Yale University in the US, and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry and Zentralinstitut für Seelische Gesundheit in Germany. Thus, I will highlight the emergence of two related but distinct conceptualizations of translation: the pipeline model from basic discovery to clinical application, and the bidirectional exchange model integrating clinical observation and basic neurobiology.
Rather than examining how scientific knowledge travels after production, this paper shows how translational knowledge constituted an orientation that reshaped knowledge production on both the meso-level of institutional organization and the micro-level of experimental practice. The 1990s crystallization of “translational neuroscience” thus offers a historical lens for understanding current debates about the relationship between translational knowledge imperatives, science policy, and knowledge production practices.